INDIAN POLICE RAID PILGRIM INN; SIKHS HIT 'DESECRATION'

More than 500 heavily armed policemen looking for Sikh terrorists raided a pilgrim inn next to the Golden Temple of Amritsar Saturday and authorities arrested 68 people in raids throughout the city.

In Ahmedabad in western India, police fired on clashing mobs Saturday in renewed communal and caste violence that has claimed at least 14 lives in one week.

Police confiscated weapons and arrested three people at the inn next to the temple and arrested 65 others in raids throughout Amritsar, 250 miles north of New Delhi in Punjab state, police said.

Sikh political leader Harchand Singh Longowal condemned the raid near the Golden Temple -- the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion -- as a "desecration," the Press Trust of India reported.

Temple officials compared the raid to the army assault on the shrine last June ordered by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to root out Sikh militants who had taken refuge there. The action left at least 600 people dead.

Gandhi was slain last Oct. 31 by two Sikh bodyguards who said they were avenging the storming of the Golden Temple.

Singh also warned the raid will not help Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's efforts to return calm to Punjab, where most of the nation's 14 million minority Sikhs live and where militants have been waging a bloody campaign for autonomy.

"Rather, it will rouse the sentiments of the Sikhs," the Indian domestic news agency quoted Longowal.

A police spokesman one of the three arrested in the raid on the pilgrim inn next to the Golden Temple was an employee of the Sikh Temple Management Committee. A hand grenade and a pistol also were confiscated.

The raid followed the attempted assassination Friday of a state leader of Gandhi's ruling Congress Party and the slaying of a party worker by two gunmen wearing traditional Sikh turbans.